any promise which Charles might hold out to this effect during his visit to England, seeing that Leo X. who then filled the chair of St Peter, was in the prime of life, and many years younger than the cardinal. Our answer is, that no object whatever could appear too distant or unattainable to Wolsey's insatiable ambition, and that the affair of the interview at Guisnes is decisive of the character of Wolsey in this respect. Leo died in the vigour of his age, but the emperor failed to redeem his pledge, yet his consummate dissimulation prevailed on Wolsey once more to attach himself to his interests in the hope of ere long gaining the object of his aspirations, on the death of the new pope, Adrian VI., whose great age and infirmities rendered that event extremely probable at no distant date. Adrian died in about a year and a half after his election, and Wolsey again felt the triple crown encircling his brows, but was doomed again to experience the hollowness of Charles's protestations: with the support of the imperial party the cardinal De Medici was elected pope under the title of Clement VII.; and England soon after entered into a close alliance with France; though not before Wolsey had pocketed a bribe of one hundred thousand crowns from Francis, under the name of arrears due on the Tournay pension. The home-administration of Wolsey displays greater firmness and integrity; yet his financial measures were not only unpopular, but, in some instances, highly unconstitutional. On his repulse in the house of commons and at the hands of Sir John More, then speaker, Wolsey did not summon a parliament for seven years after, although the very next year was distinguished by the audacious attempt to levy a subsidy of one-sixth of every man's substance. The simple edict of the executive was considered by Wolsey authority sufficient for the execution; but "the courage and love of freedom natural to the English commons, speaking in the hoarse voice of tumult," defeated the daring attempt. His attack on the wealth and endowments of the church was more popular and therefore more successful. In two years he dissolved forty-one of the lesser monasteries, and would have proceeded to greater lengths, had he not been held in check by Henry, who was not yet prepared for such sweeping measures as he himself afterwards adopted against monastic institutions. With the means thus supplied him, Wolsey became a munificent and enlightened patron and supporter of literature and popular education. He established a school and made arrangements for a college at Ipswich; he founded the magnificent college of Christ's church at Oxford; and extended his patronage generally to the universities and places of public instruction throughout England. He also bestowed the most minute and sedulous attention on the education of the duke of Richmond, Henry's natural son, and the princess Mary. These were services which throw a lustre around this extraordinary man's character; but they were hardly appreciated at the time, and whatever they might have done for Wolsey's popularity, the harshness and sternness with which he enforced his home-administration, throughout every department of it, rendered him exceedingly unpopular. The prohibition of games of chance, and his severe sumptuary laws, were highly disrelish

* Hallam.

ed; and the cardinal's own magnificence and licentiousness stood in most unfavourable contrast with such attempts to reform and correct abuses in the private economy of families. "He who grudges every man his pleasure," said the people, " spares not his own." Wolsey displayed less than his usual prudence in the share which he took in the Lutheran controversy. By causing Pope Leo's bull against Luther to be posted on every church door in England, along with the fortytwo 'damnable and pestiferous' errors of that great reformer, he in effect did more to promote the cause of the Reformation than many of its best friends could accomplish at the time. Luther knew his man, and hesitated not to designate him in his 'Apologetical letter' to Henry, as "illud monstrum et publicum odium Dei et hominum, cardinalis Eboracensis, pestis illa regni tui.” Yet, it must be allowed on behalf of Wolsey, that he did not use his power in a very sanguinary manner against the reformers, and that, in fact, his remissness in searching out and punishing heretics formed one ground of impeachment against him.

We are

We have already hinted at the connexion betwixt the affair of Henry's divorce from Queen Catharine and Wolsey's downfall. not prepared to state with certainty what were the precise sentiments which the cardinal entertained respecting that measure; but from Wolsey's behaviour on the occasion of its first communication to him, it would appear that he foreboded from the first that such a step on the part of the king would prove fatal to himself at least. "The cardinal," says Galt, "fell on his knees, and entreated the king to abandon a design so hostile to the faith of which he was the declared champion and defender." Yet both the queen and her nephew, the emperor Charles, charged Wolsey with having originated the divorce indirectly through the bishop of Tarbes. "Of this trouble," old Hall makes the queen to say, "I may only thank you my lord cardinal of York; for, because I have wondered at your high pride and vain glory, and abhor your voluptuous life, and little regard your presumptuous power and tyranny, therefore of malice you have kindled this fire and set this matter abroad, and in especial for the great malice that you bear to my nephew the emperor, because he would not satisfy your ambition and make you pope by force." The appointment of Wolsey and Campeggio, by a papal bull, as a legatine court to try the question of the divorce, sealed the minister's fate. After long vacillation, the two legates avoided coming to a decision by adjourning the legatine court. The impatient spirit of Henry was now provoked to the uttermost, while both Catharine and Anne declared that they regarded the cardinal as their personal enemy, and expected not to receive justice at his hands. The first decided intimation which Wolsey received of the altered terms upon which he now stood with the king, was the marked coldness of his reception at Grafton, where the court rested, on his going thither with Campeggio who had now determined to return to Rome. On his return to London, he opened the court of chancery with his accustomed parade; but the next morning he was waited on by the dukes of Norfolk and Suffolk, who demanded the great seals from him. With this demand he refused to comply without a formal letter to that effect from the king himself; but two days afterwards, the dukes returned, and presenting a

written order from Henry, bore away the seals. Wolsey now retired to Esher; but not before he had made some miserable exhibitions of abject submission towards the tyrant

"Whose smile was transport, and whose frown was fate."

An information was now filed against him by the attorney-general for having, contrary to the statute of provisors, exercised legatine authority in England; he was at once pronounced guilty on this charge, and declared to have incurred the penalties of a premunire; his immense property was seized; and he was hurled from the highest pinnacle of wealth and grandeur to instantaneous and utter destitution. Wolsey held a dispensation under the king's sign manual for the very facts on which he was sued, but having been seized with his other effects, it was now withheld from him, and he was thus prevented from pleading an instrument which must have protected him wherever law or reason could make their voice heard. A transient gleam of sunshine once more lighted up his fallen fortunes. Henry in a fit of pity for his exminister, granted him a free pardon and reinstated him in the sees of York and Winchester. Wolsey's characteristic love of splendour was again enkindled, and he was preparing to be enthroned at York when his final arrest for high treason, by the command of his capricious sovereign, took place at Cawood. This last shock was too much for a heart already broken with indignities and dangers: his moral fortitude forsook him; and before the train which had been sent to escort him to the Tower reached Leicester, the hand of death pressed heavily upon him. By great care he was brought to the abbey of Leicester, where he received the two last charities of a death-bed and grave, with many circumstances thus affectingly narrated by Cavendish: "Upon Monday in the morning, as I stood by his bed-side, about eight of the clock, the windows being close shut, having wax lights burning upon the cupboard, I beheld him, as me seemed, drawing fast to his end. He perceiving my shadow upon the wall by his bed-side, asked who was there? 'Sir, I am here,' quoth I.—' How do you?' quoth he to me.— 'Very well, sir,' quoth I, if I might see your grace well.'—'What is it of the clock?' said he to me.-' Forsooth, sir,' said I, 'it is past eight of the clock in the morning.'-Eight of the clock?' quoth he, 'that cannot be;' rehearsing divers times, 'eight of the clock, eight of the clock; nay, nay;' quoth he at the last, it cannot be eight of the clock for by eight of the clock ye shall lose your master: for my time draweth near that I must depart out of this world.' With that master Doctor Palmes, a worshipful gentleman, being his chaplain and ghostly father, standing by, bade me secretly demand of him if he would be shriven, and to be in a readiness towards God, whatsoever should chance. At whose desire I asked him that question. 'What have you to do to ask me any such question?' quoth he, and began to be very angry with me for my presumption; until at the last master doctor took my part, and talked with him in Latin, and so pacified him."

Kingston entered, and bade him good morning. "I tarry, master Kingston, but the will and pleasure of God, to render unto him my simple soul into his divine hand." After a pause, and after having explained the fatal nature of his disease, dysentery, he addressed himself again to Kingston as follows:

6

6

"Master Kingston, my disease is such that I cannot live; I have had some experience in my disease, and thus it is: I have a flux with a continual fever; the nature whereof is this, that if there be no alteration with me of the same within eight days, then must either ensue excoriation of the entrails, or frenzy, or else present death; and the best thereof is death. And as I suppose, this is the eighth day: and if ye see in me no alteration, then is there no remedy (although I may live a day or twaine) but death, which is the best remedy of the three.'Nay, sir, in good faith,' quoth Master Kingston, you be in such dolor and pensiveness, doubting that thing that indeed ye need not to fear, which maketh you much worse than ye should be.'- "Well, well, Master Kingston,' quoth he, 'I see the matter against me how it is framed; but if I had served God as diligently as I have done the king, he would not have given me over in my grey hairs. Howbeit, this is the just reward that I must receive for my worldly diligence and pains that I have had to do him service; only to satisfy his vain pleasure, not regarding my godly duty." The dying man, having laid his injunctions upon Kingston most humbly to commend him unto his royal majesty, proceeded thus:

"And say furthermore, that I request his Grace, in God's name, that he have a vigilant eye to depress this new pernicious sect of Lutherans, that it do not increase within his dominions through his negligence, in such a sort, as that he shall be fain at length to put harness upon his back to subdue them; as the king of Bohemia who had good game, to see his rude commons (then infected with Wickliffe's heresies) to spoil and murder the spiritual men and religious persons of his realm; the which fled to the king and his nobles for succour against their frantic rage; of whom they could get no help of defence or refuge, but (they) laughed them to scorn, having good game at their spoil and consumption, not regarding their duties nor their own defence.

"Master Kingston, farewell. I can no more, but wish all things to have good success. My time draweth on fast. I may not tarry with you. And forget not, I pray you, what I have said and charged you withal; for when I am dead, ye shall peradventure remember my words much better.' And even with these words he began to draw his speech at length, and his tongue to fail; his eyes being set in his head, whose sight failed him. Then we began to put him in remembrance of Christ's passion; and sent for the abbot of the place to anneal him, who came with all speed, and ministered unto him all the service to the same belonging; and caused also the guard to stand by, both to hear him talk before his death, and also to witness of the same; and incontinent the clock struck eight, at which time he gave up the ghost, and thus departed he this present life." He expired, as he had predicted, as the clock struck eight, on the 28th of November, 1530, in the 60th year of his age.

The moral pathos of this closing scene of Wolsey's life must soften our feelings towards him. But historical justice requires us to pronounce the most unqualified sentence of condemnation upon his whole political career as one of boundless and unprincipled ambition through

out.

Anne Boleyn.

BORN A. D. 1507.-DIED A. d. 1536.

Her father was Sir

THIS unfortunate princess was born in 1507. Thomas Boleyn, afterwards created earl of Wiltshire and Ormonde, and her mother was daughter of the duke of Norfolk. At the age of

seven or eight, she accompanied Mary, Henry's sister, to France, at the time when that princess became the wife of Louis XII. After Mary's return to England, Anne remained in France, as an attendant on Claude, the queen of Francis I. and she is said to have lived thereafter with the duchess of Alençon. The precise date of her final return to England is uncertain. Burnet supposes that she came back with her father in 1527. In England she became a maid of honour to queen Catharine, in which situation she seems to have been free from gross outward impropriety of conduct. "She carried herself so," says Burnet, speaking of this period of her life, "that, in the whole progress of the suit"— this refers to the action of divorce from Catharine-"I never find the queen herself or any of her agents fix the least ill character on her, which would most certainly have been done had there been any just cause or good colour for it." During her residence at court, she attracted the attention of Lord Percy, son of the earl of Northumberland, and a page in the household of Cardinal Wolsey. Accordingly, a marriage between Anne and Lord Percy was proposed, but the cardinal and the king himself objected to the match. Considering the future history of Henry, it is natural to infer from his objecting to the marriage of the noble youth, that his own attachment to the young and beautiful maid of honour had begun; and from a confession of the king himself, an excellent historian has traced that attachment to the year 1527.2 Accordingly we find that in May of that year she was his partner in the dance, at a royal entertainment given at Greenwich. It was in the July immediately succeeding, that Knight was sent to Rome, with a view to a divorce from Catharine. While the tedious process for obtaining that object was proceeding, Anne was considered as a favourite, if not as a mistress, of the king; and few, perhaps, if any, will doubt, that his attachment to the maiden, whose external charms may be allowed-without derogating from the virtuous character of Catharine— to have been greatly superior to the queen's, fostered, or at least accompanied his scruples respecting the validity of his marriage, supposing these to be sincere. As to the particular manner, however, in which his passion influenced his mind in his attempt to have the marriage nullified, there may be room for question. Sir James Mackintosh seems

History of the Reformation, Book ii. The same author has largely refuted, in regard to Anne Boleyn, an old historian, Sanders, by whom she is represented as the daughter of Henry VIII. himself by the lady of Sir Thomas Boleyn, and as very dissolute in the early period of her life. Sanders seems to have aimed at blackening the character of Anne, under the influence of party-feeling.

Sir J. Mackintosh, History of England, vol. ii. p. 191. "He reproaches her," says the historian, speaking of Henry and Anne, "for cruelty to one who was one whole year struck with the dart of love,' which fixes the commencement of his passion in 1527.'